by Laurel Dewey
“Well, there was Jack, of course. And his wife…uh…it started with an L.”
“Louise?”
“Yeah, Louise Webber. They had one kid…a son…he was around six, I think.”
“Bailey?” Jane offered.
“Yeah, Bailey Webber. Small kid for his age. Really puny looking.”
“Why did they leave?”
He hesitated. “What do you mean?”
Jane glanced down to the article in the Millburn Township Register. “The missing boy? The red-haired kid?” she asked, trying to remain as vague as possible.
“Yeah.” Holgate sounded suspicious. “But why are you calling him missing? They found him a couple weeks later.”
“Sir, I can’t go into a lot of detail about the angle we’re working here. That’s why you’ll have to bear with me and tell me what you remember.”
Holgate seemed more relaxed. “Yeah, okay. As I’m sure you already know, it couldn’t be proven that there was a connection between the Webber family cutting out of town and the Russian kid also leaving. But you know, there were a few whispers of what might have happened.”
Jane’s gut clenched. “This Russian kid? He lived in the back house at 43 Warwick Road in Short Hills?”
“I think that’s correct. I know it was right near where that crazy teenager lived who killed that retarded boy.”
“Jordan Copeland?”
“Yeah! Copeland. Must have been some bad juju going on in that neighborhood to have all three of them live there.”
“Three?”
“Well, yeah? The Russian kid, the Copeland boy and the Webber family.”
Jane felt the floor drop out from beneath her feet. She opened her computer. “Sir, could you hold one second please. I’ve got to take this call.” Jane buried the cell phone underneath a pillow on the bed and quickly entered the Russian kid’s address into the MapFind search engine. The page displayed, depicting a much more detailed overview than the artist’s illustration in Time magazine. Jane clicked on the boy’s address to include the immediate area around it. “Son-of-a-bitch,” she whispered as she noted the name of the street that ended in a cul-de-sac and T-boned right into 43 Warwick Road. It was Wentworth Drive. Jane grabbed the phone from under the pillow. “You said people whispered? What exactly did they whisper?”
Holgate sighed, not comfortable with the conversation. “Well…you know? That Jack Webber took the Russian kid and…you know…” His voice trailed off. “Hurt him?”
Jane thanked Holgate and hung up. She was just about to dial Weyler’s cell when he called her.
“Jane!” he said urgently. “I’m back here with Bo at town hall. I just got a call from CBI. They got a hit on the bloody fingerprint on the Ace of Spades. This doesn’t make any sense. It comes back to a missing boy from over forty years ago. His name is Samuel Kolenkoff.”
“Russian…” Jane murmured.
“Yeah. I did a quick background check using different aliases and I found a Sam Cole in the system… same heritage, same hair color, same birth date, same place of birth. He lives in Chicago and he drives a black Nissan pickup truck. He was picked up on several vagrancy charges ten years ago. But here’s where it gets macabre. On his employment history, it states that he worked exclusively at mortuaries and cemeteries.”
Jane looked at the photo of Jake’s dead body. She saw his blackened upturned fingers, his maggot-eaten feet and his mottled chest… His chest. She grabbed the loupe and held it close to the photo. “Jake…”
CHAPTER 35
The shades were drawn in Bailey’s office, lending a funereal mood to the room. It had been several hours after Weyler and Bo left the Van Gordens’ house. Bailey took off in his SUV to clear his head at the Midas gym, leaving Carol alone at home to roam the massive house in shock. With such a large house, it was easy for someone to sneak in and sit in Bailey’s office chair, cowboy boots propped on his pristine desk and wait. And that’s just what Jane was doing when she heard Carol’s footsteps descend the stairs and cross to Bailey’s office to close the doors.
“Hello, Carol,” Jane quietly said.
Carol jumped and stepped into the room.
Jane rested her Glock on her right knee. “Close the door, Carol.”
“Please put the gun down,” Carol whispered.
Jane didn’t move an inch. “Close the door.” Carol did as she was told. “Sit down!” Jane’s voice was harsh.
Carol slid into the chair on the opposite side of Bailey’s desk. She looked like a trapped deer during hunting season. “What do you want?”
“When you look in your husband’s eyes, Carol, what do you see?”
Carol seemed taken aback, not expecting such a question. “ I…ah…”
“Do you see love?”
Her chin quivered as tears welled. “No.”
“Compassion?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Trust?”
The tears streamed down. She shook her head.
“What do you see?”
Her eyes brimmed with agony. “Distraction.”
“How does that make you feel?”
She lowered her head. Tears welled and fell to the carpet. “Forgotten…ignored…,” she whispered as a deep ache swelled in her heart.
Jane swung her feet off the desk, still holding the Glock. “How about when you looked at Louise? What did that feel like?”
“I’m not sure…”
“You never felt like you were looking in the mirror? Like you were the fresher version of her, dutifully acting out your appointed role of the passive, blind, numb mother and wife?”
Carol looked up at Jane. “We…we had an understanding.”
“Oh, I bet you did. You were perfect for the part. I bet she handpicked you for the job. She looked for the woman who could be her substitute. Someone who knew how to block out the obvious and turn away at the appropriate moments, pretending that everything was fine.” Jane leaned forward. “Isn’t that what she did when she was a young wife with her little son, Bailey? When her husband’s sordid indiscretions reared up, she just turned away. You know what I’m talking about. If I don’t see it, it ain’t there?” Jane got up, moving around the desk slowly in the dim light. “But her husband, Jack Webber, made it difficult to keep turning away.” Carol looked at Jane in shock when she heard the name, Webber. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Webber?” Carol looked apoplectic. Jane drew the silver cigarette case toward her and tapped on the embellished engraved W on top. “Take a look at the only vestige of your married name, honey! Right there!” Jane emphasized, forcing Carol to really look at the case. “That’s where Jack Webber kept the Chesterfield 101s. And that…” Jane pointed to Bailey’s out of place, rough-at-the-seams desk chair, was the ol’ man’s office chair. I can see the pervert sitting in that chair, smoking his Chesterfields and reading his dirty European kiddie porn magazines. I bet he ordered them from one of those slimy little catalogs they used to have back in the day…the ones that promise you plenty of photographs of naked boys romping in the grass or playing in the stream. So innocent, right? To the untrained eye, it’s not obscene.” Jane stood behind Carol and leaned closer to her. “But to a pedophile like Jack Webber, it’s cotton candy, a bag of peanuts and a home run.” Carol turned away from Jane and covered her right ear with her hand. Jane leaned against Carol’s left side. “Does the word pedophile disturb your delicate senses, Mrs. Webber?”
Carol turned away again. “Please…”
“Pedophile, Carol! Your husband’s father was a pedophile! And your mother-in-law knew it, but she didn’t do anything about it! She just kept turning away because that’s the kind of dirty family secret you don’t talk about. She had her money, her nice house in Short Hills…no need to upset the applecart just because ol’ Jack has a compromising compulsion. So, Jack starts with photos and then…then it’s time for the first conquest.” Jane pulled up a chair and sat knee-to-knee with Carol. “Now, I wonder who he practiced on? An
y ideas?” Tears fell from Carol’s eyes but she stayed silent. “Come on, Carol. The days of you keeping your damn mouth shut are over. Who do you think Jack used first?”
It took Carol almost half a minute before she whispered, “Bailey.”
“If the stats are correct, then you’re right—Bailey. Now, I don’t know what Jack did to Bailey. I don’t know how far it went with him. But I do know that Bailey either pissed him off, or he was done with him because Jack decided to look for another little boy. You see, that’s the way it works. They go just so far with the first one before their courage is bolstered and feel they can take it to the next level with the second kid. Patterns, Carol. The devil is in a criminal’s known patterns. Discover the pattern and you’ll know the next step of the crime, unless he gets caught. And Jack got caught, didn’t he? But as luck would have it, Jack was obscenely rich and the kid he stole and held in some location for…what…a couple weeks? That kid wasn’t rich. He was just a fuckin’ immigrant… and a Russian immigrant at that! In the late 1960s, no one gave a shit about a Commie immigrant. Maybe the kid’s mama wasn’t a citizen. Maybe ol’ Jack threatened her. Or, maybe…yes…his family paid the kid’s mother off and they left. Disappeared. Gone. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.” Jane leaned closer. “But sometimes, Carol, those pesky little ghosts from the past who we like to pretend aren’t there, decide that they don’t like being ignored anymore. And they come out of the shadows and turn our lives upside down until we finally acknowledge them.”
Jane reached over into the darkness and pulled the stack of plastic-covered clues across the desk. She laid Wolfe’s book down on the desk in front of Carol. “And they start to tell us their story.” Jane slapped down the first transcript. “They use words,” she said, following this with the magazine cutout of the boy wearing a red cap being dragged by his arm, “and they use pictures.” Jane angrily slammed the fourth clue of the second transcript on the desk. “Words!” She pounded her fist on the wood as she revealed the graphic drawing that implied sodomy. “And then more extreme pictures!” Carol turned away, but Jane reached over and turned the woman’s face back to the desk. “This is real, Carol! Don’t turn away!” Jane showed Carol the riddle about the Packard. “Sometimes they tease us with riddles,” Jane said before reaching across the desk to reveal the stuffed bear. “Or toys that meant something to them.” Jane pressed the front of the stuffed bear to Carol’s face. “You smell that, Carol? That’s vomit from a long time ago. That’s vomit from fear when that poor little Russian boy was being raped by Jack Webber!”
Carol weakly pushed the bear away and sobbed. “Please… please don’t…”
Jane stood up, towering over Carol’s submissive frame. “But you already know that, don’t you?! Because when Bailey found this clue in his mailbox, he knew exactly who in the hell it belonged to! He understood the story that was being told because he was there! He stupidly believed that if you don’t see it, it doesn’t exist! But there, right there…” Jane said shaking the bear, “in three-dimensional reality was his worst fucking nightmare! The ghost he thought was long dead had resurrected and was regurgitating a past he thought his family had buried. All these clues that had arrived in your mailbox and didn’t make any sense, suddenly fell into place. Now I understand when Bailey slipped and referred to that ‘little shit,’ he wasn’t talking about Jordan or Jake. He was talking about the little kid from a long time ago because that’s the last time he saw him, so he’s still a ‘little shit’ in Bailey’s mind. And, later, when Bailey smashed the vase against the wall and said, ‘Fuck him’ again, he wasn’t talking about Jake!” Jane hovered over Carol’s chair. “So, he knew and you knew within days of Jake going missing who had him! And that is when Bailey made the decision to ignore everything! To pull the reward fund! To not deal with this pesky, buzzing creature who refused to stay dead. That’s when Bailey called in his mama… his frontline, old-guard defense. Maybe he was feeling a little unsure of himself, and he knew that mama Louise could be depended upon to remind him how important it was to bury the past.” Jane forced Carol to look at her. “And when she told him that some sacrifices had to be made and that those sacrifices included losing his only child, he accepted that, didn’t he?”
Carol collapsed on the desk, burying her face in her hands. “Oh, God, please, stop!”
Jane was relentless. “And you went along with it!” she screamed.
Carol raised her head. “What was I supposed to do?” she asked in a weak voice.
“I gave you every opportunity to talk to me! You and I were alone more than once. You could have used me to save Jake! But instead, you decided to keep playing the dumb, ignorant, victimized wife!”
“And I will suffer the rest of my life because of it!” Carol said, her voice finally showing some modicum of anger.
Jane sat back. “Well, you’re good at suffering so you shouldn’t have any problem handling that!”
“Why are you talking to me like this? What did I ever do to you?”
Jane shook her head. “Jesus, Carol. You really do have that victim mentality honed to perfection, don’t you?”
Carol reached out to Jane, clutching at Jane’s arm. “If I had Jake back for one minute, I’d tell him that I loved him more than life itself and that I was so sorry…”
Jane believed her. “You know, it’s too damn bad you can’t love yourself as much as you loved your son. If you did, you would have saved him.” Jane sat back. “But little Jake was pretty far gone before fate intervened. He could hear his ancestor screaming from the other side and he thought he was going crazy. But he kept being drawn to books and people who he thought might help shed some insight into all the questions that remained unanswered in his troubled head. His battle cry became, Truth! He even got a poster with that word and he put it up in his room so he would always be reminded of his ultimate objective. That poster must have pissed the shit out of Bailey. But the more Jake dug and tried to work out his feelings through his art, the more confused he became. The demons that were unleashed didn’t match the pretty little box that he lived in. And when he really started digging…to follow the trails and see where they led, he sure got one fucking eyeful.” Carol stared at Jane, obviously confused. “Oh, you didn’t know about that? He caught his daddy dipping his wick in unfamiliar territory.”
Carol’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God!”
“I know that you knew about it. That was another one of those understandings you had. But it just didn’t set too well with Jake. I mean, he’s fifteen years old. He’s questioning his own sexuality and he looks in the mirror and he’s not exactly developed or masculine-looking. So, now, Jake is a mess. His entire reality is shot to hell and that damn ghost keeps haunting him from the past. Until one day, he thought that his only recourse was to hang himself. But I understand why he felt that way. It was programmed into his bloodline.” Jane leaned over the desk and slid Jake’s sketchpad to Carol. “And as long as we bury past deeds, we run the risk of unconsciously repeating those deeds over and over again” Jane opened the pad and flipped the pages in front of Carol several times. The woman’s eyes shone with astonishment and shock. “Just like Jake’s grandfather ended up stashed away in a mental hospital…it was a mental hospital, wasn’t it? I thought it was a prison cell at first, but I did a quick check and there’s no record of Jack Webber going to prison. And of course, he didn’t! Because the crime was never reported! But that didn’t mean that the family wanted him around. He was a liability and so the decision was made to stash him away in an asylum because, remember Mrs. Webber…if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.” Jane continued to flip the animated pages showing the old man stepping onto a chair and hanging himself. “So one day, Jack Webber, wearing his Palm Beach shirt and his fedora, stood up in his room in the asylum and tied his belt around a beam and hung himself.” Jane snapped the book shut. “Problem solved!” Carol jumped, startled.
“But, you know what, Carol? Patterns…patte
rns…patterns… They stalk us. Wonder how long it’ll take before Bailey hits rock bottom and finds a good piece of rope?” Carol looked at Jane incredulously. “Oh, yeah. It wouldn’t shock me one bit. Jake certainly got acquainted with a strong rope before he was rescued.”
“Rescued?” Carol asked.
“Yeah, rescued from the rope only to be held against his will. From the frying pan and into the fire. That’s pretty bad karma, wouldn’t you say?”
“But… how would he know where to find Jake?” she whimpered.
“His name is Samuel Kolenkof. He goes by Sam Cole. Did they ever tell you his name?” Carol shook her head. “Well, they probably figured the least said to you the better. So, how did Sam find Jake? I’m not sure. But I do know that when you want something badly enough, you figure out how to get it.”
Carol started to think. “What about Jordan Copeland? You arrested him.”
Jane pursed her lips. “It’s still up in the air as to how that one plays out.” Jane got up, gathering the clues together and stuffed them, save for the teddy bear, into Jake’s sketchpad. “You know, the best gift you can ever get is a good night’s sleep. How many years has it been since you’ve had one of those, Mrs. Webber?” Carol stayed silent as Jane moved to the office doors.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Carol said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “The way you keep trying to make someone happy and you can’t do it. No matter how hard you try, they’re never satisfied. And the only reason you keep trying is because you want to be loved and feel safe.”
Jane considered her words. “Get off the cross, Carol.”
It was obvious that the town’s Twenty-first Century improvements hadn’t reached the Midas jail yet. Located behind Town Hall, the building housed three small cells and one interrogation room with an observation area on the other side. A tiny, secured front room held a desk and computer and a deputy whenever the cells were occupied. When Jane arrived in that front room, the deputy greeted her and asked if she wanted him to accompany her. She declined his offer, but before he buzzed her through the large door, she asked him one question.
